


Tongue Tied

by DrGaybelGideon



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: BUT HAVE A DRABBLE, F/M, i don't know what i was thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:09:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7889155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrGaybelGideon/pseuds/DrGaybelGideon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course Frederick's speech therapist would be the lover of his latest murder attempt. Of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tongue Tied

Speech therapy with the ex-girlfriend of the man who bit off his lips. Someone up there- Frederick would fake a smile if his new lips didn’t still feel too tight- really hates him.  
Reba’s a fascinating study, an interesting woman once the venom that coats the word ‘hybristophile’ has faded from his tone. Polite. Stubborn. Deliberately avoids all mentions of their ‘mutual acquaintance’ even though there’s sadness clear on her face at his loss. (None of the sheer giddy glee he feels at the memory of crime scene photos of the man hacked to pieces. Shame. They could have bonded over that.)  
Doesn’t seem to have realised she was dating a killer.  
Well. The woman is blind.  
  
She’s annoyed this session, clear in her face and bleeding into her tone at his eighth stumbling over the word ‘lemonade’. He’s angry too, seething internally at her mirrored response because he’d really, really like to hear her pronounce the letter m with lips that don’t work, he needs to go back, protest, talk to the doctors about long healed stitches and lips that still don’t feel, Frankenstein’s monster in plastic surgery form.  
“It’s psychological, Frederick. You can do it. You just aren’t.”  
That’s a bold statement met with a slurredly spat response. The woman’s untrained, simply ‘Reba Mclane’, no PHD in psychiatry, and the fact she’s attempting to talk to him about psychological responses to traumatic events when clearly suffering herself-  
Ah.  
-Is strangely illuminating. And explains more than he’d like about his reasons for choosing a blind woman for a therapist. But his new hideous appearance has nothing to do with the fact his lips won’t form some words, having them torn off has far more to do with that.  
  
He ends up giving her a ride home, thoughts not quite bitter enough to stop him worrying about the dark raincloud gathering over the head of the woman sat small and unseeing, a tiny delicate thing outside of their therapy building.  
She accepts, something he scoffs at until horrifyingly he notices her eyes are swimming, staring off out of the nearest window as thunder rolls (answering his hideous question about people crying). And then the seat next to him’s empty, and it takes a moment for him to register that he’s stopped at the lights and she hasn’t just thrown herself out of a moving car. She’s walking, cane moving ahead of her and her head held high, stumbling slightly on the small edge where stone meets the road and he’d watch open-mouthed for hours if the cars behind him weren’t beeping.  
  
He’s stopped for five seconds and the ridiculous woman’s thrown himself out of a window.  
And to think he once thought Freddie was bad.  
  
He’s panicking by the time he finds a place to pull in, seething at the fact he’s in the middle of nowhere with a parking warden eyeing up his parking spot and a missing speech therapist it will of course look like he’s murdered if she’s found-  
And then the anxious tight knot in his stomach evaporates, clenching with anger at the fact she’s just standing, head back in the middle of a field, the tallest thing for miles around and completely oblivious to the danger he’s in.  
“We’re in the middle of a thunderstorm and you wanna stop and feel the rain?!”  
It explodes out of him, making her head snap around to face him, and of course she’s still crying, still upset, and of course she’s upset, she’s giving therapy to the victim of an ex-lover who supposedly shot himself in front of her, and he’s shaking now, apologies trapped by the end of his tongue still being too short, painful, trapped.  
“You managed.” An observation as moving as it is embarrassing.  
So he did.  
Maybe he’s wrong, of course he’s wrong and she’s known it all along. He’s underestimated her blindness, a disgusting hypocrisy given he’s now partially blind too.  
“B-back to the car.” The adrenaline passes, and yet he manages to speak again. Stammers a little less than normal even though the blood’s flushing his face at the knowing smile on hers. Her eyes change when she smiles, something that probably gets him out of the parking ticket being placed on the window of his car when he gets back. And then he’s at her house, embarrasedly letting go of a hand he hasn’t even realised he was holding.  
”If you ever need to talk about it outside of office hours-”  
”I’m f-fine.” A feeble protest, ignored as a hand gently rests far too high on his thigh.  
”If you ever _want_ to talk-” It’s accidental, he’s sure of it, an unintentional warmth of a hand that he’s reading too much into the touch of until there’s a squeeze and a kiss of a slightly-gasped cheek. “-You know where I live now.”  
”I’ll s-skip the candles. For both of our sakes.” A disgusting thing to say, awful enough for her to gasp at, a small glimpse of the dark humour he hasn’t managed since before the fire.  
And then she laughs, and he lets out a small relieved huff of laughter too, too loud in the small space between them. They’re both giggling then, and it’s as odd and inappropriate and wrong as her hand moving a little further up, pausing just before it reaches places he hadn’t even dared let the nurses touch in the hospital, things he was barely sure would work and- well- are definitely being proven still intact with the pressure on his thigh increasing.  
Ah.  
But she’s just using him to stand upright, then smiling at the embarrassingly pathetic noise it draws from him as she pulls away.  
“Next week at seven, Frederick.”  
  
He’s almost glad, when he turns up for a purely platonic therapy session next week that she can’t see exactly how much makeup he’s coated his face and hands in, although she does comment on the cologne when she leans into breathe on his neck.  
”D-date?” It’s pathetic, stammered, everything it’s not supposed to sound like in his head.  
”Say it properly. Then I’ll think about it.”  
”Date!” A further angry explosion around thirty minutes later, and Frederick Chilton has has a slightly smiling mouth on his, plans for next Friday and something to gossip about with Freddie Lounds.


End file.
